And on January the 20th, what happened?

Joe Biden became the president.

Donald Trump left the White House.

It's really rich for Democratic leaders to say that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy when he peacefully gave over power on January the 20th, as we have done for 250 years in this country.

Did he lose the 2020 election?

Tim, I'm focused on the future.

Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?

That is a damning non-answer.

Yikes.

While you were probably sleeping last night, the highly anticipated vice presidential debate happened.

And while usually VP debates are pretty inconsequential, when you have an election like this one, which feels existential, even the usually mundane things become very high stakes.

And if one person understood the high stakes of last night, it was clearly Governor Walz, who was fitzing in his dungarees up there.

But we'll get into each candidate's performance.

Plus we'll check their facts and unpack what last night's performance means for November.

Let's get into it.

Presidential debates always generate a ton of buzz and media coverage, and with them a lot of opportunity for misinformation.

In a world where the media landscape is increasingly divided, it's important to stay informed and get context into how the media is covering important issues.

For example, news outlets dissecting the key takeaways from last night's debate are a great example of how different the media reports on stories depending on their bias.

You can see that the left is highlighting

Vance's defensiveness and emotional reactions during the debate, portraying him as condescending and resistant to facts, while the right critiques the moderators for bias against Vance and focuses on Vance's criticisms of Harris's record on immigration.

For example, leftist publication,

The New Republic's headline says,

J.D. Vance lashes out after the smallest fact check in VP debate.

Meanwhile, right-leaning publication, The Blaze, published the headline, J.D. Vance hammers Tim Walz on immigration, energy policy, and the economy in lively but civil VP debate.

Very different takes.

And that's where ground news comes in and why I've been using them for a year.

Today's partner, Ground News, is a great tool for understanding the news.

They provide helpful context for these starkly different headlines about the same story.

You can see the overall bias distribution of the news sources covering this story.

Only 13% of the coverage is right-wing news sources, which is similar to the presidential debate and tells me maybe their readers just don't really care, I guess.

On the right-hand side, you can see the overall factuality rating of the sources, with most sources receiving a high factuality rating so you know who you can trust.

Seeing factuality ratings like this, along with who owns the source, can be really helpful to provide more context to your own echo chamber.

You and your social media may have had one reaction to something J.D. Vance said, but it's important to understand the larger picture and what people outside your bubble are saying.

And I'm able to get all this context and information thanks to Ground News.

And with the US election fast approaching, my favorite Ground News feature at the moment is their 2024 US election focused blind spot feed.

With a bird's eye view of issues that tend to get more attention from the left or right than others, I can easily step out of my echo chamber and understand how partisan narratives shape reality and votes.

I'm always really impressed with Ground News and I genuinely think they're a great resource for identifying biases in the media.

So scan my QR code, click the link in the description, or go to ground.news.legia to get 40% off the same vantage plan I use to stay informed, which comes to about $5 a month.

You get unlimited access to all Ground News has to offer while helping an independent team keep the media transparent.

Thanks, Ground News.

First, the performance.

Because debates are, after all, a show, a charade for the American people to see the candidates perform under pressure and answer key questions about policy to get a better feel for what it would be like for them to be in power.

Which is why the VP debate is usually small potatoes because let's face it,

VPs don't really actually have that much power.

A key thing to remember, as we discuss Vance's accusations of all the things Harris hasn't managed to do while wielding the great and terrible power that comes with being a VP, such as photo ops and press conferences.

I already made an episode about how little power a VP actually has.

You can check that out after this.

Anyway, so when we tune into a debate, we're looking for a performance.

And there was a clear winner in last night's performance.

And it wasn't the bumbling Minnesotan governor,

I'm so sorry to say.

I was rooting for him.

He is so great at talking face-to-face with people.

And even his stump speeches on the campaign trail have been smart, down to earth and folksy.

But at the debate, Walls struggled.

He had clearly been heavily prepped, but it was too much information.

Instead of saying, here are the three things you need to talk about for each topic, he clearly tried to internalize a wide range of talking points for each topic, and then tried to very quickly and somewhat incoherently string all of the ideas together in each of his answers as though he were checking the words off a mental list, but forgetting the other words that have to go in between the buzzwords to make coherent points.

He was so focused on hitting those points that not only did he speak way too quickly, and listen, I'm a fast talker, okay?

That's probably the number one complaint

I get on these videos, is people want me to slow down, to which I say, no.

I watch and listen to literally everything at 1.5 to two times speed.

Now it's your turn to listen at 0.5 speed, okay?

This is for all the 1.5 to two times speed watchers and listeners out there who are able to listen to my shit at regular speed.

You're welcome.

Also, I'm not giving a speech or participating in a debate where the rules are vastly different.

I'm doing a song and dance on social media where attention spans are 0.5 seconds, so I gotta move fast.

Unfortunately for Walls, he was in a debate where speaking at a measured, smooth, articulate pace is an asset that he did not possess, but J.D. Vance did.

And I think that surprised a lot of people, myself included, for a number of reasons.

First, the hype over Harris and the clear and easy victory she had against Trump in their debate put our expectations of Walls very, very high.

Though I will say I don't appreciate the media's reporting on him as a typical simpleton folksy Minnesotan as though we're all out here just fumbling around flyover country with our dumb, simple minds that can't think too fast or speak too good.

As a Minnesotan, I resent that.

As a governor of Minnesota and VP running mate, however, that is the caricature that has been painted of Walls, and that is one of his selling points, that he is down to earth and doesn't speak like a politician but instead like your friend's dad who helps you fix your carburetor.

And I think outside of the debate stage last night, he's done a fantastic job of selling that caricature in a way that's endearing to the American people, but it did not serve him well last night.

Another thing that surprised me and a lot of people was how smooth and articulate Vance was because he has also been painted by the left as a caricature, a weirdo who doesn't know how to speak like a human and who says horrible things about immigrants and women with impunity.

And I think his strengths are directly opposite Tim Walls'.

When he tries to talk to people out and about in a community and when he's asked direct and challenging questions by reporters who don't let him get away with things, he looks like a fool.

But when given free reign on a debate stage with an opponent who isn't as slick as him, he was able to make his lies sound believable and coherent.

And we'll get into why I think this is the most insidious and important takeaway of the night, but let's get into those lies because unlike the presidential debate, this VP debate was actually incredibly substantive and got into the weeds on a lot of issues which opened the door for a lot of lies, mostly from Vance.

Lie number one, Vance claimed the U.S.

is the cleanest economy in the entire world and argued that if Harris really cared about climate change, which Vance refused to confirm was a real thing, then she would bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

instead of outsourcing them to dirty, dirty China.

While that's an interesting spin on climate denial that I think plays well into the Republican rhetoric that it doesn't exist, it is not true that the U.S. is the cleanest economy in the world.

The most widely cited measure of a country's green level is the Environmental Performance Index.

That score includes more than just the economy, but is a good measure of how green a country is generally.

The U.S. ranks 34 on that list behind all of Western Europe, most of Eastern Europe, as well as Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

So I'm not sure where he's getting the cleanest economy in the entire world talking point.

China does rank far below us at 154th, but to say that bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

would improve clean air and water is disingenuous at best because we still have huge problems in this country with too much emissions, and it removes the blame from the shoulders of the companies doing the polluting, whether that's here or in China or anywhere.

We all have to breathe that air.

There is no our air versus China's air.

We're all trapped in the same bubble.

Also, companies tied to J.D. Vance, either from when he was a venture capitalist or from the billionaires who have funded his career, were actively moving manufacturing jobs abroad.

So this is, once again, an example of J.D. Vance saying and believing whatever will get him what he wants at any given moment.

There are 25 million illegal aliens in the U.S., and they're stealing our housing and our jobs.

When asked to explain how he plans to implement the largest mass deportation in history, as Trump has promised, Vance made the claim that there are 20 to 25 million illegal aliens in the country.

That is false.

It's impossible to know the numbers, but several studies estimate it to be around 11 million people, half of what Vance claimed.

The Office of Homeland Security report says it.

The Pew Research Center says it.

The Nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute says it.

And even the conservative think tank,

Center for Immigration Studies, has estimated 12 million.

So this is patently false.

Vance repeatedly throughout the night blamed all of the problems in America on either immigrants or manufacturing jobs outsourced overseas.

He blamed our housing shortage on too many immigrants.

And while it is absolutely true that there are many cities in this country struggling with homelessness epidemics and don't have additional shelters and housing for the migrants arriving from the border, that shortage is not because of immigrants.

Immigrants are being affected by it, but placing the blame on the shoulders of some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, many of whom are seeking asylum or simply to be able to provide a roof and food for their families, that is letting major corporations off the hook for the way they have absolutely destroyed the housing stock in this country.

People are struggling to find housing because wealth inequality is the highest it's ever been, because BlackRock owns all of our houses and landlords are price-fixing, and we've let free enterprise run amok with one of the things necessary for sustaining human life, shelter.

There is enough wealth in this country that everyone should be housed and fed, including the influx of immigrants at our borders.

We have enough wealth to support them.

It's just being hoarded by billionaires who buy out our politicians so they don't have to pay their fair share thanks to handy tax loopholes.

Politicians around the world who benefit from provoking fear in their base of supporters want everyone to think that the wealth is scarce and must be protected from those violent barbaric immigrants.

But the only reason the wealth is scarce is because the people in power and their billionaire benefactors have made it so.

But to distract us from noticing that and banding together in class solidarity, they villainize immigrants and sit back while we all fight over the scraps they've thrown to us.

It's truly some Mad Max dystopian shit, but people who aren't taught to see the bigger picture of how fucked we all are by this system because they come from a failing education system that is also being torn apart by politicians and their billionaire benefactors, they don't know to look at the bigger picture, and instead, when Vance and Trump say, hey, look, there's so many impoverished immigrants here struggling to find housing along with you.

No, no, no, don't look at the man behind the curtain.

It's actually those very immigrants who are stealing your affordable housing and murdering everyone on site while they're at it.

So the problem must be solved by closing down the borders and being very, very afraid of brown people.

Last night, J.D. Vance also blamed unemployment on immigrants in what was truly such a fucking twisted argument,

I would be remiss not to point it out here.

He said that the reason why wages are depressed is because immigrants are coming in undercutting our wages and taking our jobs from us, as though it is the immigrants' fault that they're being paid $3 an hour to pick our strawberries, as though if those manual labor jobs in the fields were available,

Americans would be flocking to them, as though the owners of those farms who are paying immigrants $3 an hour under the table would happily and readily hire Americans and pay them federal minimum wage, which would more than double their labor costs, if only these deviant migrant workers didn't keep coming and demanding to be paid $3 an hour, or as though we have an absolute surplus of red-blooded American construction workers desperate for jobs, but all these immigrants keep coming in and demanding to work long hours for criminally little pay while ruining their bodies.

All of these arguments demonizing immigrants bet on Americans' short-sighted inability to connect the dots, and that's why they work, because a lot of us aren't very good at connecting the dots.

I don't have job, immigrant has job, therefore immigrant take my job.

Again, manufacturing scarcity so billionaires can continue to profit while the rest of us fight amongst each other like ants trying to grab up the scraps they're throwing us.

You are far closer to homelessness and starvation wages than you are to being a millionaire, but the brainwashing of the American condition has you identifying with and empathizing with and humanizing businesses and billionaires more readily than humans crossing the border in search of safety and stability, because we've been conditioned to believe that we're all temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and that scarcity is caused by the most vulnerable among us, and J.D. Vance and Trump did not invent this, but they are capitalizing on it in a moment when the entire world is turning nationalistic and demonizing migrants in order to protect their billionaire benefactors from having to answer to the angry mobs they should be answering to.

Also, 90% of fentanyl in the U.S.

is brought in through legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens.

I am so sick of this lie that illegals are using children as drug mules and smuggling them across the border in the night, and that's why we're all dying of drug overdoses.

It once again blames immigrants for the problems caused by U.S. citizens and U.S. companies.

Moving on.

Next lie, is Trump planning on registering pregnancies?

Walls claimed that Project 2025 wants to create a registration of pregnancies.

That's not true.

Project 2025 says the Trump administration should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.